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0 pointssafety1st2mo ago0 comments

It's pretty wild how the best screenshot of a usable menu is from, like, Office 2000. What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?

0 comments

Nextgrid2mo ago

Technology moved from being a tool to an ad delivery vehicle.

Tools' success metric is how much they make your task easier/faster. Ad delivery machines' success metric is how much of your time they waste.

Shitty UI making you spend more time in front of the screen is considered a good thing according to those "designers"' performance metrics.

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nicoburns2mo ago

> What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?

For the last ~20 years: designing software for mobile devices

lynndotpy2mo ago

If you would like to spend some time in awe, you might fondly regard the screenshots in the GUIdebook gallery: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots

It's chock full of old screenshots from a variety of old desktops.

bambax2mo ago

UI OS for ordinary people peaked with Windows NT (1993).

liveoneggs2mo ago

Check out this actual book that used to come with a computer about how to use the desktop: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/806-4743/806-4743.pdf

badsectoracula2mo ago

And modern desktops do not even documentation, there are all sorts of shortcuts and small features in Windows, for example, that seem to be passed around between people like computer game cheats instead of being documented somewhere :-P

bonesss2mo ago

Web technologies took off, web giants emerged, and the desktop monopoly maintaining rough standardization and being forced into steady ease of use improvements was hobbled.

Microsoft’s desktop dominance was challenged by Google Docs and Facebook apps in parallel, Microsoft had to jump to web tech late, and the last few decades have been them reconciling their stack to the fact they missed the web and mobile despite pioneering key user-facing tech for both. Then they entered catchup-mode for client and search tech, only to later realize maybe they don’t care because the cloud catchup efforts blossoming into MS-consultant orthodoxy for every-darned-thing made their cloud offerings the most profitable bit… Ads and desktop stagnation pulled Windows into a weird OSX-at-home territory everyone kinda hates. And then LLMania took off, entrenching MS cloud and AI strategies into all of it, all the time. Pushing so hard that they’re gonna spend billions distancing their semi-Enterprise office brand from the term‘Microslop’.

TLDR: the rush to the web/mobile moved the focus off thick clients and desktop affordances, the money is elsewhere, a universal GUI toolkit isn’t obvious for anyone, and SaaS feels better online

meindnoch2mo ago

Computers became a necessity. You have no choice but to own a computer, so there's no evolutionary pressure to prevent their enshittification.

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